PAMLA Conference and more

A summary of recent Conferences where a Brontë-related talk has been presented. With a particular focus on the recent PAMLA 2006 Conference:

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. One-Hundred-Fourth Annual Conference
November 10-11, Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, California

November 10, Panel: Reading British Literature as Cultural Criticism

• Defining “Nature” in Jane Eyre: Constructive Deconstructions of the Term. Leslie Simon, Boston University.

The essay will examine the variant definitions of "Nature/nature" in Bronte's narrative, considering the term's material and ideological implications.

November 11, Panel: Post-Colonial Women's Writing

• Writing in the Margins: Revision in Wide Sargasso Sea. Jonathan Lee, University of California, Riverside.

This paper analyzes the intertextual relationship between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in terms of revision and dialogism. It analyzes the problematic nature of Jane Eyre in terms of its assumptions on gender and culture and the techniques Rhys employs to subvert and invert these assumptions.

November 11, Panel: Victorian Masculinities: Body, Affect, and Sexuality

• Nursing Masculinity: Illness and Gender in Bronte. Basak Demirhan, Rice University.

In this paper I will analyze how masculinity is negotiated and defined through illness and nursing episodes in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These episodes stage a negotiation of masculinity and consolidate gender hierarchies between couples. They also explore the nature of sympathy, which appears to be genuine affect that flows between characters and a social ritual at the same time.

2006 UF EGO Conference - Contours of Captivity
November 2-3, Gainesville, Florida

November 2, Panel #1: The Yoke of Power: Class, Gender, and Race Imbalances in Victorian Fiction

• Jane Eyre's Anti-Feminist Message: Captivity in the Fairy Tale, Carolyn Kelley (University of Florida)

Advanced Placement Strategies and Laying the Foundation. Fourth Annual English Conference
October 27-28, 2006, Dallas

October 27

• Revisiting Brontës'Style and Substance in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Lynne Weber

The session focuses on ways of exploring Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre with pre-AP and AP students.

In Search of (Non)SenseLiterary Semantics and the Related Fields and Disciplines (IV iALS) October 12-14, 2006, Institute of English Philology, The Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland

October 13 Panel: Literary Hermeneutics

• The Quest for Self-Identity: The Construction of Verbal Significance in Wuthering Heights, Hsiu-Chih Tsai

10th Annual Westmont College. Undergraduate Research Symposium
April 19, 2006, Kerr Student Center, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California

• Island, Imperialism, and Identity: Caribbean Women Novelists Respond to the Brontë Sisters, Kristen Bergman and Cheri Larsen-Hoeckley, English Department, Westmont College

This project examines the works of Caribbean postcolonial novelists Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé as they respond to two nineteenth-centuries British novels by the Brontë sisters. Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights re-imagines Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights on the island of Guadelope and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Writing within societies affected by European political and cultural imperialism, Rhys and Condé confront the notion of a stable personal identity within the Brontë’s novels. They explore the hybrid identities of people living between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer and suggest that a stable and fixed personal identity may be a luxury of those in a position of some privilege and power.

4th ANNUAL GENDER STUDIES STUDENT CONFERENCE

April 15, 2006, University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama

• UNDERGRAD RESEARCH: Honorable mention: Domesticity and the Domestic Angel in Wuthering Heights and Lady Audley's Secret, Corine Mathis Dr. Harrington

Categories: Scholar, Talks